While toilet plumbing technology has evolved over hundreds of years, common problems continue to include those arising with the installation, use, and removal of toilets onto bathroom floor-located pipes and flanges engaged thereto. Professional plumbers routinely complain that current toilet seals, despite being used in conjunction with bolts, flanges, and mating brackets, allow for wobbling that eventually leads to compromised seals and leakage.
At its most basic, installing a toilet onto a floor involves mating the toilet base outlet to a soil pipe that is built into the floor. The toilet is secured in place onto the floor, usually by means of a flange built into the floor surface, to prevent the toilet's base outlet from disaligning with the soil pipe. A gasket of some type—e.g., a wax ring—is often disposed between the toilet base outlet and soil pipe to ensure that solid, liquid, and gaseous toilet contents do not permeate the toilet base outlet and soil pipe mating junction.
Where the gasket's integrity is compromised, toilet contents may permeate the base outlet and soil pipe mating junction and into the floor. Where the gasket is simply a ring made of wax or other inelastic polymer, the risk that the gasket is compromised during installation or removal increases.
Some toilet seal gaskets incorporate a ring of wax or semi-soft material disposed within a polymer sleeve. The sleeve, which is inserted into the soil pipe during installation, may incorporate a series of baffles annularly arranged along the outer length of the sleeve. While this helps maintain the attachment of the inner surface of the soil pipe to the gasket, such baffling does not make the overall junction between the toilet base outlet and soil pipe any more secure.
One such device is depicted in U.S. Pat. No. 5,185,890 entitled “Toilet Bowl Sealing Assembly.” Depicted there is, among other assembly components, a first flange with a single “centering funnel” that creates a single volume from the toilet to the drain pipe and through which waste water passes. The integrity of the seal depends entirely on the second flange, into which the first flange is inserted, that is mechanically fastened to the toilet and the floor. The series of concentric flanges depicted in U.S. Pat. No. 5,185,890 is designed to secure the toilet to the floor, and not to create any seal redundancy.
Invariably, modern toilet seals act to create a single continuous volume from the toilet base outlet and into the soil pipe, using a single gasket to create the seal. In the event the integrity of the gasket is compromised, there is no redundantly sealed volume to contain any escaping solid, liquid, or gaseous toilet contents.